This disclosure relates to personal information management, and particularly, systems and methods for management of identity and personal information on external services.
Communication systems and network systems such as the Internet enable users to access a multitude of services such as e-commerce services, banking services, credit services, social networking services, and the like. Users often maintain relationships with many of these services. They may have accounts with these services accessed by credentials such as user names and passwords. Furthermore, these services may store personal information of users, such as personal names, relationships with others, home and residence addresses, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, financial information, and so on. Such users often rely on these services to maintain this information, and any compromise to the security or accuracy of this information may impose substantial costs on those users. For example, if an unauthorized person manages to gain access to the user's account and change that user's password, login information, or personal information, then that user may become unable to access his or her account and may be forced to deal with the fallout of identity theft, which can be costly and time-consuming for the user.
In order to prevent such identity theft and unauthorized access, online services often send out notifications of changes to personal information on users' accounts. For example, where a user changes his or her password, online services often send out an email confirmation to notify the user of the password change. Unfortunately, such notifications may become too numerous and burdensome for the user to carefully review to detect fraud and/or identity theft. Additionally, such notifications may be hidden among other communications, such as other emails, and thus not be noticed by the user in a timely manner. For example, notifications may be misclassified as junk mail or spam, possibly resulting in them going unnoticed by the user. Thus, such notifications may be ignored by users and thus become ineffective.